I have a couple.
First and foremost, there is obviously strong disagreement on those being obviously disasters of Obama's foreign policy. Many have been disasters, but were they both obviously worse than alternatives, and obviously attributable to Obama's foreign policy?
In most cases, yes, they were obviously worse than alternatives. China is the only arguable exception, though I think they have been emboldened by our failures elsewhere.
Secondly, while each of these has their own threads, I'll try to have short rebuttals of each. There wasn't any better choice in Libya
Yes there was: do nothing. Another option: don't try to smuggle weapons to Syrian rebels through Libya.
Iraq was going to be a mess regardless due to the choices of the previous administration and the Iraqi government, and withdrawing at that time was close to the least bad option.
No. It was relatively stable. Obama even bragged about it being stable. He was warned that this stability could collapse if we left.
And those warnings were completely correct.
Egypt was and is massively complex and it wasn't just backing the Muslim Brotherhood at times.
I'm not saying we should have backed Mubarik. But we
chose to back the Muslim Brotherhood specifically, and that was a mistake. An easily avoidable one, too.
I actually think we should have been harder on Russia and not strongly supporting the sovereignty of the Ukraine in accordance with their giving up their nuclear deterrence was a mistake, but it could have also played into Putin's hand by providing a big bad so it's not clear.
We're a "big bad" regardless of what we do. That's not what's holding Putin back.
The characterization of Iran is laughably wrong.
No, it isn't. They're violating missile test bans. They're kidnapping our military personnel and holding them for ransom. They're giving every indication that they won't actually abide by the nuclear deal. We're getting shafted.
And our complete lack of any support, even simply
rhetorical support, for the green revolution is really inexcusable.
What has gone right is avoiding many potentially huge disasters
This is what's called
avoiding disasters?
deals with Iran which decreases hostility
You're kidding yourself. They are no less hostile.
and decreases the likelihood of them getting nuclear arms
No. It might
possibly delay them getting nuclear arms, but it does nothing to decrease the likelihood. Given how much money they're getting out of the deal, the chances are going up, not down.
thawing relations with Cuba
That's not terribly impressive. Or important.
getting Europe to take a more active roll in international issues
They're more active out of necessity because we're
failing. That's not really an achievement. And they're not doing so hot either. They're handling this "refugee" crisis completely wrong, for example.
If we had a metric about which we could judge these things it would probably be along the lines of how these things have negatively effected the US. Have they cost a lot of lives and money? No, nowhere near previous choices or alternate choices.
The Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, and we essentially abandoned the country. Twelve years later, Al Qaeda struck the US from bases in Afghanistan. Twelve years before we paid the biggest price for that mistake.
Do not imagine that you now have the full reckoning of Obama's mistakes.
Politically running on 'foreign policy disaster' isn't going to gain much traction when the alternatives advanced by the leading Republicans are believed by the electorate to be much worse. Trying to pin any of Iraq on Obama will only stick with those who would never vote Dem anyway. The Iraq war simply isn't old enough for the public to have forgotten.
If you're arguing about how the public will
perceive things (rather than how things actually are), well, Hillary voted for the Iraq war, so this isn't really much of a defense of her.
